FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT FILM HISTORIAN - PAGE 3

When thunder and lightning chase children indoors, strike back at boredom with a stack of light-hearted educational videos. History and geography lessons are cleverly cloaked in episodes of the award-winninganimated TV series "Where On Earth is Carmen SanDiego?" (FoxVideo, $9.98 per volume, closed-captioned). The world's sneakiest thief, Carmen has perfected time travel. She leads young sleuths Zack and Ivy to Boston in 1775, where they meet Paul Revere and Ben Franklin; and across Europe, where she mixes and matches features from famous paintings by van Gogh and Picasso.

Jane Randolph, a B-movie actress in the 1940s who was best-known for her role in the film noir "Cat People," died May 4 in Gstaad, Switzerland, after surgery on a broken hip, her daughter announced. She was 93. Under contract to RKO Pictures in 1942, Ms. Randolph was cast as Alice Moore, the young woman terrorized during a nocturnal swim in "Cat People," the first of producer Val Lewton's horror films. The scene of her becoming "trapped in an indoor swimming pool by an ominous feline creature whose eerie presence was suggested rather than revealed on screen" is "one of cinema's indelibly suspenseful scenes," said Alan Rode, a writer and film historian.

Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography By Donald Bogle Amistad, 613 pages, $27.95 If moviegoers are unfamiliar with the name Dorothy Dandridge, they can find glimpses of her in today's African-American actresses. She is in the defiant curl of Angela Bassett's lips, the come-hither invitation in Halle Berry's eyes, and the raw haughtiness of Vivica A. Fox. In the 1940s and 1950s, Dandridge infused film with her stunning, smoldering glamor, and redefined the image of black women in such films as "Porgy and Bess" and "Carmen Jones."

Tributes to Academy Award-winning director Elia Kazan have fallen into one of two categories: Hostile deconstructions of Kazan's controversial political actions, mixed with casual appreciations of his lengthy body of cinematic and theater work, or glowing appraisals of his filmic record and general dismissal or soft peddling of Kazan's interactions with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. Turner Classic Movies will...

By Chris Michaud NEW YORK, March 16 (Reuters) - Pop star Madonna on Saturday presented CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper with a gay media watchdog's top honors in recognition of his stature and accomplishment as an openly gay journalist. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," she said, decrying anti-gay bullying that sometimes has led to suicide. "It's an atrocity to me, and I don't accept it," she added to enthusiastic applause. The annual Vito Russo Award is named after the activist and film historian who was one of the founding member of media watchdog group GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

NEW YORK, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Television shows "The New Normal" and "Smash," animated film "ParaNorman," and "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert were among nominees on Wednesday for the GLAAD Media Awards. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which monitors media depiction of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people, announced more than 150 nominees for its 24th annual awards in categories ranging from film and theater to journalism and music. "ParaNorman," an Oscar nominee for best animated feature, was nominated by GLAAD for outstanding film in wide release, along with "Cloud Atlas," which features several heroic gay characters, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and "Your Sister's Sister.

"King Kong," "The Third Man," "Gone With the Wind," "Rebecca," "A Star Is Born," "Duel in the Sun," "David Copperfield," "Dinner at Eight"-the list of films bearing the David O. Selznick imprimatur is long and luminous. From the `20s to the `60s, Selznick, a second-generation mogul who reigned over Hollywood's Golden Age, steered a multitude of classics-and more than a few clunkers-to the big screen. The famed producer also wrote a multitude of memos, bedded a multitude of women, ingested a multitude of amphetamines and acculmulated a multitude of debts.

They are the Mt. Rushmore of silent film comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Film historian David Kalat would like to add another face to the line-up: Harry Langdon. "He came in right at the tail end of silent comedy, so his career didn't last as long. But his stuff is really extraordinary because it's so weird. It's like an Abstract Expressionist approach to comedy," says Kalat, president of LaGrange Park's All Day Entertainment, which issued a boxed set of Langdon's films Wednesday.